Prodeus - Another Doom?

First-person shooters have long been divided into two camps: AAA shooters, where players are sold the same thing every year under different sauces; and indie shooters with pixelated graphics, which seek to repeat the success of old-school shooters by playing on nostalgia. Our subject of today's review belongs to the second group. And if you thought reinventing the wheel was no longer possible, two people from Bounding Box SoftwareInc. will prove you otherwise. Having raised money on Kickstarter, two developers with experience in making shooters, Mike Voehler and Jason Mojica, intrigued players with a trailer back in 2018, took a long walk to release, and now, finally, they've reached their goal. As the description of Prodeus says: it's a retro shooter with a modern twist. And if to describe the general concept is enough one noun "Doom", then about the differences between Prodeus and the object of inspiration is worth talking more...

Retro-shooter? The plot - to hell with it!

When developing Prodeus, Jason and Michael did not care about the plot at all: there is a hero - some mysterious defiled agent - and there is the world. The protagonist is deprived of any kind of proper motivation, he just kills the local spawn left and right. Yes, some uncomplicated plot about a failed experiment and some scientists hangs in the background, but it's all secondary and unnecessary. You can't even talk about a scenario in Prodeus, it's a rarity for such games. And to hell with it...

Another Doom, but not Doom:Eternal

Strangely enough, Prodeus is based on the experience of not the last Doom:Eternal at the moment, but on its predecessor, Brutal Doom II: Hell on Earth. There was a programmer who worked with the Bounding Box Software team, and who once contributed to the modding of the second Doom. The similarities are evident: as a result we have similar leveldesign, similar balance, and similar approach to ammo management. Prodeus has 18 types of weapons. All the guns have an alternative mode of fire, each gun in its own unique way. You've got the shotgun, which charges your ammo with flammable charges; the four-barreled shotgun, which can fire one round at a time as well as two doubles; and the energy weapon, whose charge ricochets from one enemy to another, but becomes a sniper rifle when you enter the scope. Hello, Railgun from Quake 2!

The game is divided into 7 difficulty levels: from the easiest, where the enemies cause almost no damage, to the most unbearable, where the enemies eat ammo and kick the protagonist with their left foot. On the elementary levels of difficulty ammo is always in abundance, while on the normal levels the guns still have to shuffle regularly. Run out of 9mm ammo - take a shotgun, run out of buckshot - take a flare gun. Level 6 is enough difficulty to have fun, there you will have to keep an eye on the ammo, which is not so much.

There are five types of ammunition in the game, and each gun serves a specific purpose. For example: pistol, submachine gun and minigun use the same caliber. The pistol consumes little ammo and is great for annihilating weak enemies, the submachine gun is something in between the voracious minigun and the weak pistol; the minigun pours a shower of lead on your enemies, but the six-barrel machine gun takes a long time to unwind and is not accurate at long ranges. You will think about all the characteristics of weapons during the game with your spinal cord. So how many and how many guns shoot is secondary. The primary thing is the feeling of shooting, and here Prodeus did not lose face. Despite the fact that the storyboard animation of reloading is intentionally limited by the late nineties shooters, the physics of shooting, its ballistics, as well as the impact of the weapon - all on high. Even the casings, and those have their own weight and volume. But a rule is a rule: guns in hand, gunplay and opponents exclusively in sprites...

...But rules are there to be broken. Bounding Box Software foresaw the fact that the pixels may not please everyone, and allowed players to turn off the pixel styling, but only for the models of opponents:

But no one will let you transform Prodeus into a non-Xtgen game, no Unreal Engine 4, much less Unreal Engine 5. Pixels and sprites are an integral part of Prodeus...

Yes, if you're allergic to pixels, Prodeus will make your throat itch and your eyes red. If you associate the word "pixel graphics" only with something ancient and obscene, then Prodeus won't catch your eye. But look at this beauty: how the sun plays on metal objects, what soft particles, what a play of shadows, how the depth of field clearly outlines the range of vision of the protagonist:

During the rest of the game we have to observe not so much scenic views. Yes, Preaders fully understands the meaning of the phrase "meat shooter"...literally. Throughout the game cisterns of blood will be flying onto the screen. Blood will drip from the ceilings and paint the walls. Caked blood will wash over the curves of weapons. In general, Prodeus is really meaty, in some places even too much...

About the visual and armory talked, but one question remained open: how in general all this is played...

The bastard son of Doom II and Quake II

Prodeus' leveldesign, on the other hand, refers us back to the days when players didn't know any hook-and-loop, running on walls was impossible to program due to technical limitations, and levels could not be sprawling a priori on the processors of those times. Once you've completed a couple of levels in Prodeus, you might recall the corridors of Quake II with its search for colorful keys for a particular target.

The levels in Prodeus are cramped, lavishly littered with ammo, hilk and armor, and crowds of enemies. Your entire gaming experience will be based on running through the same type of corridor locations interspersed with arenas. Since the gameplay is extremely horizontal, the developers are trying to improve the platforming, so that the surroundings do not seem so flat. There are small time challenges, some dexterity checks, and some curiosity checks...

The player receives weapons not with each level, but buys them himself for a special ore. So the developers supposedly encourage to study the locations more thoroughly and strive for perfection, because at the end of each task our efforts are also evaluated. However, in practice, wandering around all the nooks and crannies is not too interesting, and not giving the player to evaluate all the guns - it's a painful penalty. The decision is extremely controversial.

There is no backtracking in the game, so if you passed a room full of ammunition, health and armor, and the next arena you screwed up - blame yourself, you can not go back for the values - the second questionable step from the developers.

The third dubious thing about Prodeus is the minicard. It opens on a separate key, it's not too intuitive, and it's inconvenient to operate. Another thing is that Bounding Box Software have thought of implementing a global visual map. Here the situation is already better:

A distinctive feature of Prodeus

In addition to the classic retro shooter set (meat, slaying hordes of monsters to the metal, mountains of guns in the protagonist's pocket) Predust has something to surprise players. In addition to co-op, the game offers players and level editor, now everyone can feel a little bit of a developer:

Theoretically, the map editor makes Prodeus not only a hardcore shooter, but also a platform for experimentation. It's not so long before players start creating maps exclusively for PvP or custom modes. Prodeus has one drawback - checkpoints do not throw the player back in progress, but serve to resurrect. You are resurrected with 100 health points, while killed enemies are not resurrected and the wounded remain wounded. Only in the finale you can not relieve yourself in this way: instead of the final boss a huge crowd of reinforced enemies without the possibility of abusing deaths for health and ammo.

Is Prodeus worth buying?

Prodeus was able to do the impossible - to bring something new to the genre of forty years ago. Only two developers were able to say their word in the field of retro shooters without funding from investors.

Was it worth buying Prodeus? Fans of the genre - a must-see. The rough edges are not so much, and you can get used to them all. Xbox owners are not even a question of buying it. Prodeus is available on GamePass, so you can check it out with a subscription. On other platforms Prodeus is inexpensive, and at a 50-70% discount, the purchase looks like a very good deal.